Flat fee recruitment is a combination of the best parts of traditional recruitment agencies and job board advertising. Your Account Manager will handle your campaign and the wide coverage of multiple job boards, all in one flat fee (clue’s in the name).
When advertising your position using a flat fee recruitment service, the recruiter will do lots of things in order to ensure that your advert gets maximum coverage, and your perfect candidates apply. Your job advert will be optimised, meaning that you will get the most coverage possible. This mainly involves the repetition of key words, as search engines rank things in accordance to how relevant they are, and this is based around how many times key words are repeated. You can read more about SEO here.
Your applications will then be screened, so that you don’t have to sort through tons of irrelevant applications and can just have the best candidates put in front of you. We also add notes to applications, so that our clients know exactly why we’ve ranked applications in the way we have.
Additionally, if your adverts aren’t performing as well as expected, the flat fee recruiter can then resource the position. This means searching on multiple job boards or social media sites in order to find candidates who may not be actively searching and applying for roles, but are perfect for your position.
The Pros
The obvious benefit over traditional agencies is that they are far cheaper. When recruiting through an agency, you are subject to paying an extra fee (often 15%) for every candidate hired. This means that if you are looking to hire multiple candidates, using traditional agencies can become quite costly. In comparison, this kind of recruitment requires only one flat fee. This means that whether you hire one candidate or fifty, you only pay one fee.
When comparing flat fee recruitment to job board advertising, the main advantage comes from your applications being screened, and candidates being resourced. Also, with this kind of recruitment, you can have your advert posted onto multiple job boards for a lower cost than if you had paid to advertise the role on several job boards yourself.
The Cons
One of the disadvantages of flat fee recruitment is that if your role is particularly specialist, it may be harder to fill without the help of a recruitment agency. For example, an expert PHP Developer in the middle of nowhere, who needs an exact degree and a certain amount of experience may be hard to fill just using advertising. This means that a traditional agency may be the best option for you.
Hopefully by now you know whether or not flat fee recruitment is the one for you, depending on your budget, location, and the role you want to recruit for. If you are still undecided, we are now offering a free consultation to help you decide on the best recruitment solutions for you.